Age-Old Art meets New-Fangled Science

Acupuncture has more than it’s share of detractors, mostly folks
steeped in western science and medicine. For many people any
evidence of acupuncture’s efficacy is purely anecdotal. We are
children of Science and Reason. We want to know HOW IT WORKS.
Explanations of meridians, Yin and Yang, and Qi (Chi) don’t cut
it for the skeptics. Now, though, the skeptics are starting to
take notice, thanks to high-tech imaging devices that illustrate
exactly how acupuncture affects the brain.

Past
acupuncture studies have been relegated to trial and error.
Some study groups were needled, some weren’t. Some seemed to
respond, some didn’t. Many impressive studies have been done on
animals. Because animals do not experience a “placebo effect,”
the results could be considered untainted and positive to
acupuncture. After all, acupuncture is now being used
successfully on thousand dollar show dogs and million dollar
racehorses. It is agreed that acupuncture causes the body to
release “feel good” endorphins into the blood stream, lessening
pain and providing a sense of well-being. But how can
endorphins in the blood stream translate into healing? Skeptics
insist that these experiments didn’t determine cause and effect
and were not properly controlled. Depending on a scientist’s
predisposition, either an experiment proved acupuncture a
failure or a flop.

Enter
Professor Zang-Hee Cho of U.C. Irvine. Cho is not a medical
doctor but a physicist, and an eminent one to boot. He is a
member of the highly respected National
Academy of Science, the inventor
of an early version of the Positron Emission
Tomograph, or PET scan,
and a pioneer of the MRI scanner, both of which have
revolutionized our ability to see into the body and brain. He
was also formerly skeptical of acupuncture, considering it
“voodoo medicine.”

The
turning point for Cho was a walk up a Korean mountain in the
wrong shoes. He slipped, injuring his back so severely that he
could barely walk after his flight back home to California.
Although he scorned acupuncture, no western medical treatments
seemed to help. He finally gave in to urging from his relatives
and went to see an acupuncturist. After a 15-minute procedure,
he had to admit it: acupuncture works.

Acupuncture
melted the pain and spurred Cho to use modern technology -- a
functional MRI machine (fMRI) -- to explore old medicine. The
results, published in 1998 in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(one of the world's premier scientific journals), showed a
direct correlation between acupuncture and the brain,
the first time any effect in the brain has ever been
demonstrated.

Cho first
hooked subjects up to the fMRI to examine the effect on their
brains when bright lights were flashed in their eyes. As
expected, the visual cortex of the brain showed increased blood
flow. Then he tried two different tests with needles. He had a
skilled acupuncturist needle the acupoint in the little toe,
used by acupuncturists to treat eye diseases, measuring the
results with the fMRI. He also had the acupuncturist needle a
spot nearby that acupoint that is not considered to be related
to the eyes. The results were strong: when acupuncture was used
on the non-visual acupoint, the fMRI showed no change in the
brain’s visual cortex. However, stimulation
of the vision-related acupoint showed the same reaction in the
brain as direct stimulation of the eye with light.

Cho
noticed something else. When he did a series of fMRIs,
alternately flashing and shutting off the light, and graphed the
results, two distinct patterns emerged. Four participants showed
an increasing flow of blood to the cortex; eight showed a
decreasing flow. He repeated the experiments several times,
with the same results. It was as if the two groups were
opposites of each other. And indeed, they were. When asked why
this might be, the acupuncturist assisting Cho gave the reason
as Yin and Yang, so elemental to Oriental medicine, yet still a
mystery to Western medicine. Without seeing the data, the
acupuncturist was able to correctly identify which subjects
showed a Yin response and which showed Yang in 11 out of 12
cases. The two types tend to correlate to the Western type A
and B personalities, he said. Yang, or Type A, tends to have a
hasty or positive attitude, a high heart rate and warm body.
Yin, or type B, tends to have a lower heart rate, cold
extremities and cautious and often negative attitudes.

Still Cho didn't understand
how it all worked: what was the connection between the tip of
the little toe and the visual cortex? He asked a UC Irvine
Neuroscientist, who seemed unfazed by the question. He
explained that the nerves in the foot connect to the central
nervous system, which connects to a part of the brain that
includes the visual cortex. As the
acupuncture signal passes to the brain via
nerves, it possibly stimulates the hypothalamus, the "executive
center" of the brain, responsible for the production and release
of hundreds of neurochemicals. These neurochemicals, together
with the autonomic nervous system, may have some effect on
vision-related disorders. Perhaps, Cho suggests, the
neurochemicals are the energy known to acupuncturists as Qi.

With
around 1,500 acupoints on the body, Cho has a long way to go
with his research. But he's hooked now. He's applied to the
National Institutes of Health's Office of Alternative Medicine
for a $12 million grant to continue his research.

Not only could it lead to more understanding of how
acupunctureworks, and thus greater
acceptance of it by the Western medical establishment, but
acupuncture may also enable scientists to use MRI technology to
explore areas of the brain they weren't previously able to
reach. For example, scientists could use acupuncture to
stimulate digestive acupoints and watch the effect in the brain;
it would be more difficult to do that any other way.

Others are
working with modern medical advances to unlock the mysteries of
acupuncture. Based on 15 years of research, The Biophysics
Basis for Acupuncture and Health, published in 2004 by Dr.
Shui Yin Lo, attempts to bridge Chinese medicine and western
science using molecular biology, quantum physics, and quantum
field theory as well as other sciences. Dr. Lo is a professor
of Chinese Medicine and former Physics professor at the esteemed
California Institute of Technology (the west coast’s MIT).
Using infrared imaging, he was able to detect noticeable
differences in temperature in the body after acupuncture
treatment. He has theorized that acupuncture meridians are made
up of polarized particles (perhaps water clusters), which align
to form an electric field throughout the body’s network of
meridians. When the alignment of these particles is disturbed,
sickness and pain result. Acupuncture works to help re-align
these charged particles, allowing the Qi to flow and the body to
heal itself.

Discovering how acupuncture works is perhaps years away, but now
scientists have proof that acupuncture affects the brain and
body beyond any placebo. It activates specific portions of the
brain associated with the problem being worked on, and it
affects the body’s temperature at sites of healing, as shown
through infrared imaging. Acupuncture is truly an art for all
ages, and as newer studies are performed we will see acupuncture
treated not only as an art, but a true healing science.

Anyone
who has been to the clinic recently knows we’re undergoing
some changes – the acoustic ceiling is being taken off, décor
is being changed, walls are being painted. All paint is no
VOC (volatile organic compounds), so fumes should not trouble
those with chemical sensitivities. These changes will take
place over several months, so the clinic may have an
“unfinished” atmosphere for a while. Please bear with us
throughout our changes. We hope you will like the
improvements to the clinic!